IDEA #59 - Music News and Concert Dates for your Favorite Bands
By Steve Poland • May 17, 2007
This idea is essentially to create a central place you can go and have a completely personalized experience that keeps you informed on music news and concert dates for bands you like — and doesn’t show you the rest (although might give you the option to see news on artists that are similar to the artists you like — which would be culled from Last.fm, because they already do that artist similarity stuff).
Right now I don’t have a central place to see all the news related to music artists/bands that I like. Ditto on when they are coming to my town for a concert (the iConcertCal plugin for iTunes is the closest thing to good for bands I like coming near me to play a concert, but it only taps into what artists are found in my iTunes and it’s a plugin that works in the stand-alone iTunes software).
I have a Last.fm profile — basically the service is an app that runs on my computer and tells their server what music I’m listening to, then Last.fm mines all of that data and stores it — providing me charts/stats on the bands I listen to the most overall, this past week; what songs I’ve listened to the most, etc. It’s a great service and has all that data available in RSS format.
I get my music news from a variety of sources — Pitchfork, VH1, and plenty of music blogs. I’d like any news or blog post that mentions any artist found in my RSS feed (of artists I have ever listened to — or maybe make a threshold of any artist I’ve listened to more than 20 times, to eliminate random artists that I listened to on a whim, or off a soundtrack) to then display in one central screen for me (and provide me an RSS feed of all that news).
I’d like to also see this for concerts — pull in that event/concert data from Last.fm (their event dates are wiki’d by their community, but becoming quite impressive — quite complete), or possibly pull in the dates from MySpace artist pages or Pollstar (although they’ve sued in the past for websites “stealing” their data) — or you can license event data from CelebrityAccess ($30k/yr) or Mojam ($18k/yr).
Right now, band pages on MySpace don’t have a standard format in terms of their URL structure — thus, I’m wondering if someone out there has compiled a giant list that matches up band names (i.e. Pittsburgh DJ “Girl Talk”) with their respective MySpace URL (i.e. http://www.myspace.com/girltalkmusic). That way, you could then grab the full event list for a band (here’s an example events list for the artist Girl Talk) — and then just parse those events. Otherwise, here is an example events list RSS feed from Last.fm.
Monetize this creation much like Last.fm does — ads — new music CD banner ads, apparel, etc — anything for your 13-30 year old demographic.
Oh, and you can display concert tickets for sale/wanted on craigslist (rss search for the artist name in the respective craigslist city subdomain — although looks like they don’t want sites crawling their site like I’m suggesting). Also plugin an affiliate code with listings from eBay and eBay’s Stubhub.
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Steve, check it out, http://tourb.us/
Keep an eye on http://www.bandocracy.com... We’re gonna be launching something this summer that will help improve the whole concert-going experience for those who spend a lot of time online…
Steve, I’ve had this idea for a while too and have a pretty good domain for the service; just haven’t found the time to develop it. Seems to be the case for most ideas huh?
Anyway, I use http://www.Tourb.us for automatic updates for incoming concerts, but it still leaves a bit to be desired. It can pull info from last.fm accounts and iTunes playlists.
Tourb.us isn’t comprehensive. I live in Buffalo, NY — there’s nothing shown. I want a resource for news and concerts, for *my* bands — and for my city.
Interesting idea.
However, I think it is similar to Earfeeder (here and here) - isn’t it? I’ve never used Earfeeder personally, but from what I’ve read - they are quite similar.
This is the general direction I was headed in with earFeeder, before I sold it last year while it was an infant. It will be interesting to see where SonicSwap takes it. The idea there was to deliver this information via RSS. It didn’t have geography, but that was where I was about to go with it next.
I was reading Wired this evening and it mentioned a site called Eventful.com, which also seems to provide similar features.
Eventful is kinda generic - they are venue-centric - they are aggressively spreading a ‘demand it’ widget on myspace though. Eventful reminds me of say upcoming.org
An interesting text-based, craigslist-like site is tourfilter.com - but they are venue-centric too, and not map-based.
IMHO the quiet hands-down winner in this category is gruvr.com ..their tour-map thing is spreading rapidly among myspace bands big and small. Has digg-like aspects to show you popular gigs… it’s map based, requires no signup unless you want notifications when your fave bands play nearby, or reminders of specific shows.
Here’s a myspace band page with both eventful and gruvr:
http://www.myspace.com/polyphonicspree
Here’s the spree tour map:
http://gruvr.com/band/polyphonicspree
I’m on this sucker every weekend and discovering house shows.
I’m sure I’m leaving a few out like
beethere http://beethere.net/
Pure Volume: http://www.purevolume.com/tours_and_shows
OnTour (slick graphics but kinda data-poor and hard to use)
http://concerts.ontour.net/
Loud is Relative http://loudisrelative.com/
In other words, the idea’s already being done…
OH and in reply to some of the other comments - I searched
http://gruvr.com for shows within 50 miles of buffalo and 21 days and it found 47 shows.
ANd here’s galtalk…
We’re behind a startup in Spain covering live concerts and gigs called nvivo.es with concepts similar to last.fm and tourb.us but focusing on venues, social network, etc. As you’ve said, the idea is being built, lot of people have the necessity of live gigs information, let’s see wich project cover the most or attracts the most bands / venues / users…
hey that nvivo looks pretty interesting - I wish I could read spanish!
Is it going to be map-based, or do you have to know the
place names in the top links to navigate to a region?
Right now I don’t have a central place to see all the news related to music artists/bands that I like. Ditto on when they are coming to my town for a concert (the iConcertCal plugin for iTunes is the closest thing to good for bands I like coming near me to play a concert, but it only taps into what artists are found in my iTunes and it’s a plugin that works in the stand-alone iTunes software).<<<<
Check out http://Livekick.com Livekick does everything on your list. It snags your iTune artists to be sure but allows for manual inputting artists by search and by other digital music files on you computer as well as syncing with your iLike, las.FM, Pandora, Rhapsody, etc… the recommendation engine also finds shows by related artists. check it out. http://livekick.com
Tourb.us isn’t comprehensive. I live in Buffalo, NY — there’s nothing shown. I want a resource for news and concerts, for *my* bands — and for my city.<<<<
Enter your zipcode and distance you’ll travel for a show and you’ll find tons of concerts close to Buffalo, depending on your slate of favorite artists, that is. Livekick rocks.